Search engines and search engine technology have developed a great deal over the past twenty years, particularly with the proliferation of the Internet. Search engines are also widely used in enterprise document management systems whereby a user is allowed to search internal source documents of an enterprise rather than search all source documents available on the Internet. There are typically three aspects to the software in a search engine. The first is the search engine's ability to obtain and analyze source data which will be searched. The second is the search engine's ability to perform the search based on query parameters provided by an end user and identify relevant results for the user. The third is the search engine's ability to present the relevant results from the query to the user.
One shortcoming of current search engines is that the initial results provided back to the user are not particularly useful for certain types of source documents. For example, non-text-based source documents such as image files and scanned copies of original documents (e.g., PDF documents, TIF documents, etc.) are not easily reviewable by a user when they are provided in a list of possibly relevant source documents in the initial set of search results. More particularly, while some search engines provide the ability to return some portion of text that was found to be relevant within the source document, those text portions are usually out of context, thereby making them less useful.
Another shortcoming of current search engines is that the initial results are displayed in a textual format. This usually means that important visual cues in the source document may be lost, thereby making the initial results less useful to a user.